


End of Part One

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Arrested Development
Genre: Angry Sex, Angst, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-04
Updated: 2019-05-04
Packaged: 2020-02-16 20:39:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18698749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: Michael lives in a different state now. 367 miles away. 367 miles farther apart than they’ve ever been from each other.Post-series, the Bluth Boys are having a tough time.





	End of Part One

_And I'd be leaving for good, I'd be looking for better_

_But I got this broken habit I keep gluing back together…_

_– “Matches to Paper Dolls”, Dessa_

* * *

 

Phoenix, Arizona is exactly 367 miles away from Newport Beach, California.

Gob knows that, not because he’s some kind of nerd who owns a globe (“did you just say juh-lobe?” Tony asks), but because that’s his brother’s reasoning for why he can’t bring Gob a pizza at three-forty in the morning, even though Gob is high and he said please and everything.

Because Michael lives in a different state now. 367 miles away. 367 miles farther apart than they’ve ever been from each other.

“Well, at least pay for it, Mikey, it’s the least you can do.” He rocks back and forth on his heels, and Tony is leaning against the wall next to him, lightly scraping his nails in Gob’s hair, and most of him wants to focus on that and nothing else forever, but there’s something tight in his chest, hearing that number. It’s bigger than he thought.

Michael hangs up.

 

* * *

 

Being far, far away from his family, finally across state lines, is exhilarating, it’s freeing, it’s–

Kind of boring, actually.

He splits off from his son early on. It feels like pulling teeth, no, more like pulling off an arm, but George-Michael deserves a fresh start too. Maybe more than Michael himself does.

He hugs him too tightly in the parking lot of a Budget Inn, inhales the smell of his hair. It doesn’t actually smell the way it did when he was a toddler, but Michael’s mind plays this strange, kind little trick on him, in this moment as he saves up memories.

 _I’m okay_ , George-Michael signs as he climbs into his waiting Uber.  

 _I’m okay,_ Michael signs back. When he can’t see the tiny speck driving down the road anymore, he goes into the motel lobby, eats a whole thing of candy beans from the vending machine, and has a panic attack the size of which he hasn’t seen since the week after Tracey died.

The air feels even hotter, here in the desert. He spends the next few days at that same motel, watching old movies on television, staring at the ceiling, missing his son so much it almost physically bends him.

He’s in the middle of a half-conscious dream about swimming in the ocean as a child, salt on his tongue, when his cell phone rings. He just plugged it back in a few hours ago, and the automatic part of his groggy mind is fumbling to answer before he’s really even awake, to solve this problem, to come to the rescue.

It’s Gob. High or drunk, like he always is during a late night call like this, asking for him to swing by with a pizza.

“You do understand that Phoenix is in another state, buddy? We’re 367 miles apart right now,” Michael snaps, exasperated, but there’s something soothing about hearing his brother’s voice, gravelly and whining at the same time. Running a burned hand under cold water and realizing just how bad the sting had been, now that it was gone.

He still hangs up though. It _is_ 3:40 in the fucking morning.

 

* * *

 

So the “just hands” thing has a little leeway, Gob finds out.

After all, you can use your hands to put on a condom. You can you your hands to dig into someone’s shoulders as they fuck you on the floor of a purple-accented room. You can use your hands to dial one of only three contacts in your entire phone to tell your brother about it afterwards.

Tony is still naked and dozing against Gob’s chest. Beams of early afternoon sunlight striped their skin through the windows of his big office at Sitwell Construction. They definitely came here to have a meeting. He thinks.

“What is it Gob?” Michael asks, and he sounds much more alert than last time, and a little out of breath. If it was anyone else, Gob would figure he was having sex, but Michael was probably bike riding or something. The faint whizzing of rubber on road confirms it. _It’s not like he gets to ride anything else. Nice._ Gob high-fived himself softly, as to not wake Tony. “Gob? Hello?”

“Hey, dumb question, what does ‘bisexual’ mean?”

The panting slows. So do the wheels. “Oh yeah. Heard something about that.”

“Yeah, I just said it, dummy.” Gob swallows, flexes his toes out in front of him. “And Buster did too, during my trick at the wall unveiling, which was-and-and–”

“I think it’s you, buddy.”

Gob swallows. For the first time unable to even manage a stammer of protest.

Michael fills the silence. “Are you with Tony?”

“You mean right now or in, like, a gay way?”

“Both?”

“...Yes. To both.”

“I knew it,” Michael’s voice sounds smug. “I _always_ knew it.”

“Ugh, why do you always say that?”

“What?”

“Don’t worry about it. I-” the word feels caught in Gob’s throat. He wishes Tony was awake, to squeeze his hand. “It’s not weird, right?”

Grinding metal on the other end of the line, and Michael swears quietly. “Dammit, the chain on this thing keeps breaking.” He huffs and makes a few more undignified grunting noises before answering. “No, it’s not. You guys are… kind of perfect for each other.”

Gob lets out a breath he didn’t know he was holding. “Don’t tell Mom.”

Michael laughs again, but this time it’s joyless. “I haven’t talked to Mom since I left. I haven’t really talked to anyone but you.” The last few words come out haltingly, like he’s fighting them down.

Something feels warm in Gob’s chest at that. But the much stronger part of him just snorts.

“Probably cause-cause people don’t want to hang out with a grown man riding a bike around like he’s twelve.”

“Great. Yeah. Hey, why don’t you go back to your dumb gay boyfriend, I hope you both get attacked by your doves.”

They both hang up in a huff.

 

* * *

 

Michael is the most annoying customer for a realtor looking to sell a condo, for the same reasons doctors make the worst patients. He’s always tapping the walls and asking what company poured the foundation and how long they’d been in business.

“Are you in real estate?” Sarah, who is showing him the unit, asks. Her smile has gotten tight, after she answers his third question about crown molding. She’s just a girl, really, can’t be more than his son’s age.

His son _is_ an adult. Almost thirty. Right. Remember, Michael. Remember where you are, and when.

“I used to be.”

He still answers Gob’s FaceTimes whenever he has questions about the business, about some dumb Sitwell slight real or imagined. He still gets a check every two weeks for this “consultant” position.

Michael will always know how to develop houses, it’s been drilled into him since he was nine years old, the answers coming easy as exhaling. It’s not like he hates it, but it’s not a passion either. It’s just part of existence, blinking, breathing, knowing how to fill out permits.

“What do you do for fun?” He asks the video of the hallway. Gob never remembers to turn the camera on his phone around. This is a blessing, really; He’d never stop preening if he could see himself during the call.

Gob says something so filthy Michael turns red and drops the phone. He sits alone in his perfectly fine bed, in his perfectly fine condo with it’s balsa wood stairs he’s not crazy about.

He wishes he’d had the forethought to develop a hobby.

For the amount of time he spends in bed, he really doesn’t sleep. He turns on the TV and then turns it right back off when he catches a few seconds of a crime documentary about Buster. He rides his bike for miles around this unfamiliar city with no ocean and endless red rock. He sits in a bar and downs three beers before he wonders about how long this can last before he breaks and turns back into himself.

It is always so quiet.

When he does pass out, he dreams he’s in the ocean again, dissolving away in pieces.

 

* * *

 

Gob doesn’t know a lot of things most fortycough-year-olds should know.

He doesn’t know how to pay his cell phone bill or get gas into his car or make his laptop charge back up once the battery has died. He doesn’t know what a 401k is or how he can get his email set up anywhere but the third floor of the Bluth company building.

He knows that Tony and Sally get married on a Tuesday morning, at the Orange County courthouse.

He wears his purple suit and digs his nails into the palms of his hands through the whole thing. They don’t kiss, but they sign a piece of paper that says they’re man and wife and he has to sign it too, saying that he saw it happen. He wants to scream and set the room on fire with the lighter fluid up his sleeves. He wants to sink through the floor, disappear without a trapdoor.

This he knows.

 

* * *

 

Michael sleeps a woman for the first time since - fuck, since _Rebel_ \- when she plops down on the bar stool next to him at the local bar and tells him he looks like he could use a friend. She’s not his type at all, long blonde hair that’s a little stringy from one too many days without a wash and a complex, Navajo-looking pattern inked into her shoulder and snaking up her neck.

But her name is Stacey, and he says it wrong three times while they fuck in the women’s room. She pulls on his hair way too hard, and when he comes it’s sharp, almost painful. He leaves as soon as he has his pants zipped and when he stumbles outside he can see the first gray light of day peaking over the vast, endless desert. It’s Tuesday morning.

 

* * *

 

It’s not real. It’s not real. It’s not real.

He can taste blood rising in his mouth, even as Tony sneaks back to the apartment, where Gob lives (ostensibly “on the couch”). He’s smiling so easy, rolling his eyes and cracking jokes about what a waste of time that was, how he can’t wait to get out of this monkey suit, and into his favorite suit, the one with the pink sequins. He kisses Gob on the top of the head as he walks by.

He doesn’t seem to notice that Gob’s sitting on the floor, staring at his bare feet. Or if he does, he doesn’t care. Why would he? They’re not married.

 

* * *

 

His clothes are itching and too tight when he stumbles back into his empty, empty house. He rips them off and leaves them – unfolded! – on the floor, standing in his boxer shorts and undershirt. He bikes barefoot to the little coffee shop a few blocks from his condo. Little pieces of gravel kick up from the road and ping against his ankles, hard. _Death by a thousand cuts._

There seem to be a lot of people in the coffee shop looking at him. Maybe they think he’s an out of towner. That will change. He’s making himself a life here, going to be a real Arizonian. Arizonite? Soon this will be his usual spot, and people in need will come by here, specifically to find him, because they’ll know he will be there.

“Can I help you for something?” the freckled girl behind the counter asks, and she’s got big brown eyes, wary eyes. Maeby. She casts a glance at the other barista, a boy not much older than her, before asking even louder. “Sir, is there someone you need me to call?”

Michael curls his bare feet on the floor.

 

* * *

 

Tony comes out of the shower half an hour later, drying the skin behind his ears with his towel. It’s stained pink from the last time he tried to dye his own goatee. Gob has not moved from where he’s sitting on the floor.

“What are we thinking for breakfast? I think there’s leftover shrimp scampi in the fridge.” Tony’s eating habits are almost as atrocious as Gob’s, but he defends them fervently, all those late nights performing until two or three AM, he got used to eating dinner in the early dawn. “There’s half a bottle of Svedka around too, but that might make us sick, if you put them together.”

“You opened the vodka, that means it’s gone bad already,” Gob snaps. “Idiot.”

Tony stops, looks at him, still holding the towel now limp at his side. “Excuse me?”

 

* * *

 

Michael reaches into his pocket to pay for his Americano, but realizes there’s no wallet in his pants. There’s also no pants on his legs. He tilts his chin up and smiles. “This never happens.”

The girl who is and isn’t Maeby just smiles again, and gives him a plastic cup of water with no lid. “Why don’t you take this, sir?”

Michael grabs the water gratefully, sloshing some of it on his shirt. “Thanks, but I really can get the coffee, I just need–”

“Have a seat right over there, sir.”

It clicks as he’s swallows that first ice-cold gulp. Oh. They think he’s–

Are they wrong?

 

* * *

 

Gob tears his head away, still feeling the sting of Tony’s teeth scraping against his neck, because he’s never been this mad before, so mad sex with his favorite person in the world can’t calm him down.

“What is your _problem?_ ” Tony snaps, still gripping his waist, thumbs pressed hard into sides of Gob’s stomach. Gob jerks away, leaving him to stumble forward towards the kitchen counter, falling against the space he was just bending Gob over and cutting into the dark edge.

“Like you care.” He slams out of Tony’s apartment – it really is just Tony’s apartment on all the papers, Tony and _Sally’s_ – and storms down the the street like thunderclouds rolling out across the ocean.

His phone rings. He ignores it the first two times, and when he looks at the Caller ID the third time he had trouble reading the name. Letters always start blurring and switching around when he’s this full of rage.

He answers, finally, when he’s walked himself all the way to the beach, dug his toes into the sand. Planting himself into the earth makes him feel more prepared for another round of screaming.

“ _What?_ ” He rips the word in half with his teeth.

Tony isn’t raring on the other end. Tony isn’t even the one calling.

“Hey,” Michael says. “I… I need someone to...talk to someone.”

“Michael?” Gob’s voice still comes angry; he can’t change tone as fast as most people. Something in the earth shifts, and he hears the strangest, tight little inhale on the other end. “What?”

“Can you just talk to the officer?” There’s no mistaking it now. Michael doesn’t cry, hasn’t in years and years, but he does do this thing where his throat closes up and his voice gets tighter, higher. His whole body gets even tenser than normal in an effort to fight emotion.

Without waiting for an answer, there a shuffling noise on the other line and Gob is talking to a woman named Officer Hargreeves. She asks if Michael has a history of mental illness, of becoming disoriented. She confirms, with _Gob_ , that Michael – _Michael_ – has a place to stay in Phoenix, and stays on the phone with him the entire time she drives him back to the condo, watches as he fumbles and finally unlocks the door.

“And you two are related, yes?” She says dismissively. A pencil is scritch-scratching faintly on the other end. Gob knows the sound of someone filing an incident report. “You’re siblings?”

“Yeah,” he manages, and by this point he’s sitting down in the sand, staring out at the waves without seeing them. “He’s my little brother.”

 

* * *

 

Being seen as delirious, a homeless derelict, should be one of the most humiliating points in Michael’s life. It is, in a way. In the way back of his head. The rest of him is just foggy. Heavy.

They thought he was a problem.

Gob is still on the phone, left face up on the table by Officer Hargreeves, next to the glass of water she poured and left for him. One brother is breathing slightly louder than the other. No one is saying anything.

“Tony got married,” Gob finally says.

“Oh.” Michael’s voice comes out croaky, cracked, like he hasn’t talked in weeks. Come to think of it, he didn’t use to go more than twenty minutes without ordering someone around, making snide remarks, just making a constant low-level noise so no one would forget he was there.

“Not to me.”

 _You know, I gathered that from context clues, buddy._ “I’m sorry.”

Gob scoffs, but it sounds wet. “Whatever. I’ve already been married twice. He’s still behind.”

“Are you still sleeping together?”

Gob doesn't answer. “Come home.”

“I can’t. Not this time.”

“You’re going lorca out there, Mikey.”

Michael’s eyebrows knit together, with great effort. “I’m going _what?_ ”

“Lorca. You know–” Gob makes a noise like a deranged slide whistle. “Coo-coo.”

“... _Loco_?”

“Oh, I forgot you’re so politically correct," Gob snaps. "There's more Mexicans you can brownnose here, you know."

“Why are you so desperate to drag me back? What, you want me say that it’s miserable out here?”

“You just did, dummy.”

Michael knocks his fists against his kitchen table. “I need to do this. I need to make this work. This is what real people do, they move away from their-their families and their kids, and it’s high time I did that.”

“You can’t live without us, though.”

Michael watched his knuckles go white and fists pull in tighter on themselves. “You said that backwards, pal.”

“No, I didn’t.”

More silence.

“...are you on the beach?”

“Yeah,” Gob immediately sounds suspicious, like Michael is right behind him. “Like forty feet from the pier.”

“I can hear the waves.” He hadn’t been back there since Cinco. The last, fatal blow to his life in Newport. “You can’t hear the ocean here. You know I lived my whole life next to the ocean? It’s one of those things you don’t realize is a constant until you don't have it anymore.”

Gob huffs, almost beleaguered. “If you keep looking at your new desert as all the ways it’s not home, of course you’re going to hate it there.”

Michael reaches out to whack his brother before remembering they're not in the same room. Christ, he just needs to sleep. Instead, he's forced to sit with Gob's words.

“I think I’m going to...you know, keep hanging out with Tony.”

Michael drags his bare right foot against his kitchen floor. His toe gets caught under the sole and cracks unpleasantly. “Well, you’ve dated married women before, I don’t see how this is really anything different.”

Gob's laugh sticks in his throat again. "I love him. We just got into a whole...but I still do. Is that a thing that happens?"

Michael feels his eyebrows rise so high they must be completely off his face. "Wow." This life really is moving in a new direction. 

There's a heady pause, followed by some scratching sounds, and coughing. Gob gets twitchy when he's embarrassed, and isn't at all good and waiting out the awkward silence.  "Are you sure you don't want to try sleeping with dudes? It could be just the thing to get you out of this funk."

The rough vibration in his throat is so alien it takes Michael a moment to realize he's laughing.

Gob seems pleased by this, judging by the way he repeats it twice more, and Michael is so wiped out he actually keeps giggling. When they finally settle, Gob says, “y'know, some people… visit their families, when they move away.”

“I’m not coming back.”

“I meant me, idiot. Tony has all these dumb sisters and sometimes they, like, fly in from Long Island. For like a day or a week or whatever. I could do that.”

“Do you need money?” It comes out like a kneejerk.

“How dare you, Michael. I-I have other shit to do in Arizona. The peyote that they churn out over there is _totalmente impresionante."_

“You can say that but you don’t know the word _loco_?” Michael’s chest feels a little looser, but his head feels heavier. He’s...actually falling asleep. 

“Fuck you, Mikey.”

They listen to the silence on the line, the distant, crackling waves. Alone together, for a long time.


End file.
